At the current rate of net hiring, the years required to get back to pre-recession employment rates will be over SEVEN YEARS.
That’s a post-Depression high. No other recession has ever been this bad.
Every single policy implemented has been counterproductive.
At the rate we’re going, we will encounter the next recession before we ever recover from this one.
Based on the employment numbers, the recovery has been very slow; but to be honest, if I were to look at only the jobless claims numbers, I would say that there is in fact a recovery. HOWEVER, there are other key data points that tell a big picture:
1. The actual number of employed is rather low. New jobs are not being created as rapidly as they should be.
2. I would be much more happy with the improving numbers if we were not doing it with a fed government spending 40 percent more than it takes in, year after year.
3. The future of unfunded liabilities is going to cause major problems.
4. Much of the new employment is around the energy industry. That has been, and will continue to be, a blessing for the US; however, it can only go so far. I think that we are on the way to another financial crisis based on uncontrolled federal spending, but the energy industry provided enough new value to the US balance sheet so that the inevitable crisis can be put off for another 5 to 10 years (put off via financing future value and wasting those funds today).
In other words, think of it this way. The increased value of the energy industry effectively allowed the federal government to enter into a long-term refinancing of the United States (akin to refinancing a home) at 150 percent loan to value, with a low fixed interest rate that stays low for 5 years, but is floating and able to increase after 5 years.